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Oracle Vs. Google and the Right To Use APIs
jfruh writes "Even as an EU court rules that APIs can't be copyrighted, tech observers are waiting for the Oracle v. Google trial jury to rule on the same question under U.S. law. Blogger Brian Proffitt spoke with Groklaw's Pamela Jones on the issue, and her take is that a victory for Oracle would be bad news for developers. Essentially, Oracle is claiming that, while an individual API might not be copyrightable, the collection of APIs needed to use a language is. Such a decision would, among other things, make Java's open source nature essentially meaningless, and would have lots of implications for any programming language you can name."
He has asked the parties to brief him in light of the EU decision.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
As someone who worked in x86 Architecture, I'm pretty sure (though I'm not a lawyer, so get their opinion definitively first) that the issue here is not the instruction set Per Se, but various physical implementation details that would occur building real circuits to produce a processor chip.
So, for example, that's why various software-based x86 emulator/simulator writers have not been sued.
Oracle has never claimed that Google violated its patents (probably because it doesn't hold patents protecting the Java API).
The case was in fact about patents before it became clear that Google was very likely to prevail on Oracle's patent infringement allegations. At that point, Oracle decided to add a copyright infringement claim. The suit over U.S. Patents 5966702, 6910205, and RE38104 is still pending and will be resolved after the copyright suit concludes.
This pathetic attempt to blame Google for the fact that we may never be able to use free or documented APIs ever again is ridiculous. Oracle, Apple, and Microsoft started this war with software-patents. And now Oracle is trying to get APIs ruled as copyrightable. It's really egregious behaviour on the part of these incumbent tech corporations to use these sleazy litigation tactics against any successful open source product. Just spare us the bullshit. Microsoft promised this war way back with their Halloween documents and now they are getting help from Oracle and Apple.
Oracle has never claimed that Google violated its patents (probably because it doesn't hold patents protecting the Java API).
Yes they did, in fact that was the initial basis for this court action. The copyright portion is being resolved first then it moves on to the patent portion of the lawsuit.
It's worth noting that patenting the API would clearly make it patent-encumbered and thus, potentially susceptible to exactly the kind of Shenanigans that Oracle is trying to pull.
Java is quite heavily patent-encumbered.
Of course, if it was patent-encumbered, then the industry would [probably] know about it, and would steer clear, as appropriate.
Well no, that would be silly, because it is patent-encumbered but the GPL status of Java means that GPL implementations - like OpenJDK - get an implicit patent license as well as all downstream projects.
Basically, Oracle is trying to have its cake ("open") and eat it too ("license").
Just because something is open doesn't mean it can't be patent-encumbered, if you understand the patent-specific elements of the GPL this should be quite clear.